August 21, 2006

Getting In Touch With My Inner Viking

by hilzoy

I'm off to the land of my forbears, about which Montesquieu said: "the frightful countries of the north continue always inhabited, from their being almost uninhabitable." (The point being that desirable locations are fought over and thereby depopulated, while "frightful" countries are left alone.) Curiously, since I was 10, I have only spent time in Sweden during the winter, when it is very very cold and very very dark. This time, I'm going pretty far north, so I should be able to catch the end of a near-arctic summer: quite new to me.

I never really believe that internet access exists abroad, so I don't know whether I'll be posting during the next ten days. However, I leave you with three articles. The first tells us that Bush has decided to adopt one of the worst ideas of pre-Revolutionary France: tax farmers!

"Within two weeks, the I.R.S. will turn over data on 12,500 taxpayers — each of whom owes $25,000 or less in back taxes — to three collection agencies. Larger debtors will continue to be pursued by I.R.S. officers.

The move, an initiative of the Bush administration, represents the first step in a broader plan to outsource the collection of smaller tax debts to private companies over time. Although I.R.S. officials acknowledge that this will be much more expensive than doing it internally, they say that Congress has forced their hand by refusing to let them hire more revenue officers, who could pull in a lot of easy-to-collect money.

The private debt collection program is expected to bring in $1.4 billion over 10 years, with the collection agencies keeping about $330 million of that, or 22 to 24 cents on the dollar.

By hiring more revenue officers, the I.R.S. could collect more than $9 billion each year and spend only $296 million — or about three cents on the dollar — to do so, Charles O. Rossotti, the computer systems entrepreneur who was commissioner from 1997 to 2002, told Congress four years ago."

It's not just more expensive; there's also a greater potential for abuse, and -- a sure sign that we are indeed replicating the tax system of the Ancien Regime -- the private tax collecters seem to be pretty shady:

"One of the three companies selected by the I.R.S. is a law firm in Austin, Tex., where a former partner, Juan Peña, admitted in 2002 that he paid bribes to win a collection contract from the city of San Antonio. He went to jail for the crime."

Great.

The second is an Washington Post piece by Daniel Byman and Kenneth "Why We Should Invade Iraq" Pollack, which lays out most of the dreadful possible consequences of our invasion of Iraq. Personally, I don't think they pay enough attention to the ways in which the war in Iraq has enhanced both Iran's influence and its freedom of action -- I think a pretty serious case could be made that absent the invasion of Iraq (and absent comments about invading Iran from members of the administration), Iran would not now be looking quite likely to get nuclear weapons. Still, it's a pretty depressing read.

The third is an article that CharleyCarp flagged in comments, about another set of Guantanamo prisoners who have been in Guantanamo for years, despite, according to the Post, next to no evidence of any actual wrongdoing. Examples:

"One detainee was judged a threat in part because he was a karate expert and had taught martial arts to Bosnian orphans, tribunal records show. He was also classified as potentially dangerous because he was familiar with computers.

Another detainee was flagged because he had performed mandatory service in the Algerian army more than a decade ago, as a cook.

Boudella was accused by the U.S. military of joining bin Laden and Taliban fighters at Tora Bora, Afghanistan, the mountain hideout where the al-Qaeda leadership escaped from U.S. forces in December 2001. In fact, at the time, Boudella was locked up thousands of miles away in Sarajevo, after his arrest in the later-discredited embassy plot."

Comments

From the end of the Washington Post piece by Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack: How Iraq got to this point is now an issue for historians (and perhaps for voters in 2008)

Yeah, because godforbid anyone should consider the problems that the Bush administration created in the Middle East in the past five years to be a matter for contemporary debate, or should influence their vote in 2006.

I am always interested to see former supporters of the war talk about what has gone wrong, and basically say it was due to bad execution.

Please correct me if I was wrong, but are there any people out there among the pundits or politicians who say that although they did support going into iraq originally, they now realize that even going there was a mistake?

Hmmmmph. If the rotting Roundhead zombie of Cromwell were to appear, I think he might disagree with Montesquieu.

As for the tax farming story, I'm reminded of that oft-cited difference between reformers and revolutionaries, where a reformer will try to fix a system, and the revolutionary will support ways of making it yet worse, in the hopes that this will lead to a great overturning of the entirety of it. Nearly always ignoring all the costs associated with that overturning, not to mention the danger of an even worse replacement.

Grrrrrrrrr.

Still, should you see this, I hope you have a great time in Sweden. Be careful with the jet lag, though. I visited Finland for two weeks one May and never got over it the whole time I was there.

I don't know about the hooking-in of Iranian nuclear weapons aspirations with the Iraq war, Hilzoy. Iran began building a gas-centrifuge refinement facility long before we invaded Iraq. Based on its level of completion in September 2001, it may even have been in construction during the Clinton administration.

Possibly, certainly, that Iran was antagonized by us, but they've been building nuclear capability for quite some time.

Enjoy Sweden. But if you see Vikings singing about the glories of Spam, better find another cafe.

As for near-Arctic summers, I hope you bring a sleeping mask. Years ago, I went to Alaska in July, a time when Anchorage has about 3 hours of darkness per night, and the Mt. McKinley area was closer to 1 1/2 hours.

Slarti -- it's less that we somehow created their aspirations as that we have greatly limited our own freedom of action while greatly enhancing theirs. I think we might have been able to stop it without the war. The war greatly limited the number of things we could do or threaten to do, both militarily and diplomatically, and gave them a number of Very Bad Things to do to us, as well as removing their main enemy next door.

I second JakeB.'s comment regarding outsourcing, at great expense, the collection of taxes from farmers.

This is a win-win for the Revolutionaries. Destroy the dreaded bureaucracy. Then create a situation wherein people rise up against its replacement, which really is just a form of gangster/bounty hunter reality show. Voila, no money for government.

I'm warning the Republican Party. You destroy it; don't ever think of taxing me again to get any of your hated government back. The next tax revolt will be from the Left, and it will not be the gradual descent to "no taxes" we have now; the show will be over.

As for Vikings: one thing I learned on a visit to Sweden is that "Vikings" is pronounced "Viekings" will a long "e". Somehow, "Blimey, here come the Viekings, those pests," doesn't sound nearly as fearsome as "Run for your lives and hide the women and livestock. Here come the Vikings!"

Kirk Douglas and Ernest Borgnine starred in the movie "The Vikings". With the true pronunciation, Wally Cox and Bjorn Borg would have been better casting.

Now I really am going, but one last amusing footnote: I have just spent 45 minutes trying to reconfirm a whole bunch of airplane tickets for tomorrow. Why? The credit card company got all suspicious because, in a very short period of time, I charged a whole lot of small donations to charities, followed by airplane tickets within Sweden, got suspicious, and put a hold on my card.

Had I left for the airport a couple of hours earlier, I would have arrived in Denmark to discover that I wasn't going to Sweden after all.

Hilzoy: Why? The credit card company got all suspicious because, in a very short period of time, I charged a whole lot of small donations to charities, followed by airplane tickets within Sweden, got suspicious, and put a hold on my card.

Slarti writes: "That'd be an interesting topic for a blogpost of its own: how we might have persuaded Iran to step AWAY from the nuclear material had we not committed so heavily in Iraq."

So heavily, yet not heavily enough to win. Iran knows we're maxed out on troops, and that anything we do to them is going to be limited to bombing. And they know that bombing alone is no way to get us anywhere.

Speaking of bombing Iran, they also know that the current administration is a bunch of suckers for fake intelligence. Some of which was provided by a man with Iranian connections.

I'm guessing that Cheney's office has a prized stack of intel exposing the locations of Iran's nuclear and defense facilities.

Not only is our military maxed out, but any move against Iran, including airstrikes would 1) get the entire Irani population behind its current leadership and 2)cause a general uprising in Iraq by the Shiites against our troops.

Re: the Byman/Pollack article, I think Jim Henley has a valid, if somewhat spittle-flecked, take:

Kenneth F**king Pollack writes to tell us that civil war in Iraq is a very bad thing. Honest to god, this kind of thing is all the explanation this blog’s frequent resort to profanity requires. Ken baby, it’s your civil war as much as anyone’s. Pollack did more than anyone to encourage the famous “liberal hawks” to provide the bipartisan patina so useful in getting the Iraq invasion started. In the Army, someone would have long since left him alone in the study with a pistol and the discreet interval required to make the only appropriate gesture of regret, genuine atonement being impossible under the circumstances. In Japan he’d be a picture of the different ways light reflects off entrails and cutlery. In Washington, he gets to write new articles, as if he were an epidemiologist and not Typhoid Mary.

I'm late here, and Hilzoy is surely way gone already, but I since I missed this yesterday I felt like commenting.

If Sweden is anything like Norway, and I know that it is, she should find the internet pretty much everywhere. Even tiny little towns here have internet installed in a local cafe. And most hotels have access. And, failing that, the rate of people on the net in Norway is far higher than that of the US (not to mention broadband, which way more than half of all residents here have. I have a 3500kbit/s line and I only pay about 30 bucks a month) and I would suspect the same to be true of Sweden.

And reindeer is fabulous. Not only the steaks, which is the richest, tenderest steak you will ever eat, but the stew with reindeer, juniper berries and a cream sauce poured over potatoes is to die for. And for all the animal rights folks out there, whale is pretty tasty as well. Kinda like a beefy tuna steak.

Well, it's only AMOST everywhere -- meaning, in the hotel lobby, though not in my actual room.

I won't be trying reindeer -- I do periodically relax being veggie in order to try something truly exotic and strange, but having been in Sweden before, I have already eaten what's known here as renkalvsfilé (if memory serves.)

My Swedish (fluent 25 years ago) is creaking back, though oddly I am much better at saying things than at understanding. It's usually the reverse. I also find that, annoyingly, German has started to bleed into my Swedish -- annoying both because it is literally getting in the way, but also because I like Swedish better, as a language.